Category: hardware

I had ordered another one with the intent of running a Mythtv Backend and Frontend using a Realtek USB tuner.

I’ve installed Mythbuntu and got everything working, however I really like using Debian itself, and will look at doing a more custom install with Debian. So the plan is work on a Debian 7.7.0 x64 install.

I’ve configured this new Intel NUC with the usual 8GB ram (max it can take) and Dual Band 802.11ac wireless (as it’s only a $24 upgrade to buy the card), and I had a spare 500GB laptop drive, which I installed too.

Will be sure to post more about my progress regarding the Debian installation and tweaking it all.

The talk of the past year in hardware has been the Intel NUC, and I’ve been wanting to get my hand on one for the last few months, since the Third Generation module was released.

In the end I decided to purchase an Intel Celeron based one (Model: DN2820FYKH) and to load it up to run Windows 8.1 Pro.

For more detailed information about the specification, hint up the link here.

The Celeron model has some notiable differences (lacking features) between the i3 and i5 based models.

Only one memory socket (max 8GB ram) (vs i3/5 16GB max in 2 sockets).

Ships with wireless (vs i3/5 not shipping with it).

No MSATA support, as the socket for it don’t exist.

Despite this lack of feature between it’s more powerful siblings, I figured that Windows 8.1 Pro on a machine where you can install 8GB ram and a 2.5″ Laptop SSD drive would be adequate for the footprint.

Sure enough, it runs very well. Reasonable and capable little computer. I paired mine with a powered USB hub and a 19″ monitor I had spare.

Last week, on a Friday night of all things. Decided I would give RasPBX another go. After spending a bit of time on it had managed to configure my DID, my extension and setup inbound routes.

I configured enough to be able to leave it running until I can configure the other features I was using on my more manual setup. Which includes time based rules and IVR. Will get to those items in the next few days.

Will do another post shortly that shows how I got my SIP provider (MyNetFone) setup via the Trunks.

I’ve had my Raspberry Pi and Asterisk setup running now for nearly 2 months. It hasn’t failed me once in this time.

If you remember back I ended up installing Raspbian and configuring Asterisk manually from command line. This setup suits me, as I want to learn about how it all works, not learn how to use one of the dedicated images that has a fancy web GUI (and learn how to use that). I might end up changing to that type of setup eventually, however what i have now works with all the features I need.

Following from my other post here, I’ve managed to finally secure a cable I needed to hook up my USB DVB-T tuner to an outside antenna. I’ve subsequently configured my Raspberry Pi as per the forum post here with the required software.

Basically I have enabled SDR (Software Defined Radio) and using it to decode paging messages on the paging network.

I setup the tuner on Windows at first and used SDR# to find the frequency range. A friend told me roughly where to look and what to listen out for. He said you’d hear bursts every so often. Sure enough I did. I found based on my location in South West Sydney that 148.630 was the band that enabled me to get what I needed.

If you get it working, you will see output like so from the command line below;

It appears that the paging network is still very much used by many. From looking at what comes over it, you can see that the medical industry uses it, in addition to other corporations for notifications etc.

Have completed my Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS install and configured lxc (Linux Containers). I am so far very impressed just how easy it was to get this working out of the box. I think the Ubuntu team who produce Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS has to be given a big clap. Very fine job.

I’ve install some Debian squeeze lxc’s and Ubuntu ones. All seem to work great and I will post more details soon on what I have done and how it was performed, as it might help anyone thinking of doing the same.

I wanted to do this so I could run some other software on the containers and not clutter the host install. Although the host will see the processors for the container etc. But that’s fine and expected on how lxc works.

My aim was to install Mythtv as a master backend into a container and have it use my HDHomerun network based tuner. This has actually worked, and I am currently running it now, however I noticed during reboot/auto start of the container that the mythtv-backend wouldn’t start. Turns out the upstart configuration is not going to work on a linux container. Wiki page here is the link to the config that ships in Ubuntu 12.04.2, and below is my change I made so that I could get it to start automatically, it’s a hack and needs some further investigation, but I was in a rush to get it working in my environment.

These days I run a HP Microserver N40L with 3 x 2TB drives in a software raid5 on Debian linux. This machine has been performing a number of tasks, I did upgrade it to Debian 7.1, however wanted to really rebuild it.

I’ve been wanting to implement lxc, however I got it working on a virtual machine with some hacking around with a Debian host, however when i went to redo it couldn’t get it to work. Despite the research I did.

Looks like Ubuntu 12.04.x LTS has a good out of box setup for lxc, and based on that fact I think the first time in a long while I am going to change the machine from Debian to Ubuntu purely to make use of lxc which seems to work out of box without much fuss.

I attempted to do the install lastnight and as part of that install I changed my boot drive from a 500Gb to a 250Gb drive. Post install all I got during grub boot was GRUB displayed in top left corner. I tried all sorts of things to resolve it. Wasted a bit of time doing so. In the end I went hang on I changed the drive, is it possible the drive boot order got screwed up. Sure enough it had, and once I set the order correctly we could now boot. Looks like when the system tried to boot one of the other drives which had no grub files (basically nothing for stage 2 etc).